England (part III)

What
remains of all those elegant painters who spent almost as much time in writing
about painting—with much competence, distinction, and sagacity, it is true—as
in trying to attain the profound purpose of painting, like those whom they
imitated, men who had never written about it—Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian,
Veronese, and Velasquez? There remains the superficial, but sincere and
clear-sighted love for color of a century during which, since Watteau, not a
painter in western Europe, save Chardin, Goya, and the last of the Venetians
understood the voluptuousness of color. There remains an effort, insufficient
but unanimous, to bring the art of painting back to its sources, which are space,
light, shadow, and the tangle and play of reflections on forms in movement.
There is a progressive reconciliation with the real trees, the real flowers,
the real grasses of the country, and the real clouds in the sky, at the hour
when all the littérateurs, all the artists, and all the philosophers of the
Continent, caught in the current of fashionable and ideological scene-painting,
no longer saw anything but artificial, weak, and sentimental symbols.

The
lordly castles, which the painter follows as his model, are buried under ivy
and ampelopsis at the center of those great parks which William Kent, during
the first third of the century, was designing as a reaction against the fashion
for Italian or French gardens. The dryness of southern Europe, the canalizations
which it necessitates, the basins, the jets of water, the thinness, the
well-determined form of the cypresses and the umbrella-shaped pines, the aloes,
and all the somber plants which grow in the sun and the dust, impose on the
mind a clear and sharply cut image which French rationalism was to carry to its
highest point of stylization and arrangement. Here, on the contrary, there is
almost eternal rain, a soil into which the roots burrow deeply to carry
nourishment to the luxuriant masses of leaves; and here is the forest, its
dense leafage gathering every drop of water that comes with the fog; here are
wide-spreading boughs dividing into many branches; here are enormous black
trunks covered with moss and lichens. Disorder imposes itself, and savage
strength, and verdure, heavy with water. Amid smooth lawns, as lustrous as a
deep velvet, the majestic trees seem to absorb the silence. The majority of
them are isolated in groups, like peaceful giants. Some of them trail their
mantle of branches upon the ground. Leaves fall on the greensward, and the
birds that drink and go marauding there whirl by in swarms. Flower beds appear
like carpets cast here and there to affirm, amid the pantheistic disorder and
the impassable vigor of the world, the presence of calm and of will. Man
imposes nothing on Nature; he takes care that she shall follow, with his aid,
the hints which she gives him. From winter to summer, he enhances the effect of
the obedient multitude of the plants and the brooks which await the decisions
of the wind and the sun in order to change their appearances.

Milton,
in "Paradise Lost," sings of the natural garden. The natural garden
is the most powerful expression of the domestic style of the English. In France
and in Italy it expresses an artistic aristocracy, in their cult of intellect
and of design, and within these limits it stops short. In England it originated
with a practical aristocracy, which extends, by way of the collective wealth of
the country, to all the men of the city, even to the poor, for whom the garden
remains open and for whom its lawns are accessible; it submits to daily contact
with herds of sheep and oxen, whose wool and whose meat clothe and feed the
nation. Outside the flights of imagination expressed in its lyric power over
words, far from its violent trading and its practical destiny, England carries
its effort for aesthetic organization into everything which assures comfort and
repose to man—the garden, the house with its furnishing, its clean and almost
bare rooms where nothing useless is dragged in, its definite solid furniture,
its flowered windows, and its walls of red brick or of white painted wood. With
the work of art among other peoples, political and domestic styles are to be
renewed incessantly, but like the work of art again, they preserve, through
revolutions and conquest, a traditional character. There is little or nothing
for the mind. Everything is for the body and the soul, and their health and
their well-being. Morals, sport, religion, and business are in complete
agreement.

The art
of the English landscape was born of that indifference of almost all Englishmen
to that which is not virginal nature, suppleness of muscles, and rectitude of
morals. It already appears in the gardens which Gainsborough opens wide behind
his somewhat distant apparitions of great ladies and of blond children. Indeed,
he has often seen a romantic landscape, suns setting over pools, and rays of
light piercing the clouds after summer rains. At the decline of the most
skeptical century in history, the English soul finds itself even by the aid of
painting, which expresses it insufficiently. It waxes enthusiastic over the
novelists of poverty, and over peasant poets. It has such a need of nature and
of reverie that it listens with exaltation to a literary impostor because he
claims to have rediscovered the barbaric poems of the first men of its fjords
and its mountains in their struggle with the voices and the phantoms of the
ocean, of the storm, and of the fog. The Revolution in France arouses those who
are falling asleep, and renders feverish those who awaken. Byron and Shelley
flee England out of hatred for her commercial and bigoted positivism.
Wordsworth takes refuge on the shores of a solitary lake, where he will no
longer hear anything but the fall of the rain and the cry of the water birds,
where he will no longer see anything but the forest on the hill slope, the mist
in the hollows, and the universal awakening of silent life at each return of
the springtime.

It is
at this moment that the English painters, leaving Lawrence, the most mediocre
among them, to continue their tradition of fashion into the heart of the
nineteenth century, scaled the walls of the parks to explore the countryside
and to consider the sky at their ease. Old Crome, whose father was a weaver,
never even left the part of the country where he was born, and, like Burns,
alone, without guide and without companion, crossed the threshold of the
mystery of the world. The broad English land, with its covering of damp earth,
its soil kneaded of clay and water, is contained entire in each one of his
visions. With earth on the soles of his shoes and a stick in his hand, he goes
over it like a peasant who loves it for the difficulties it gives him and for
the bread that he knows how to get from it; the blood comes to the surface of
his shaven cheeks, as the mist enters his nostrils. That is all; his painting
expresses nothing more; but at that moment, when the Hollanders are silent,
when the French and the Italians—Vernet, Moreau, Hubert Robert, Canaletto, and
Guardi—are writing their careful pages about cities and stylized ruins, and
mythological countries illumined by a pale reflection from the sun of Claude
Lorrain, when Wilson, himself an Englishman, cannot tear himself from their
seductive domination, this is a revolution. The odors of the earth, all its
aspects determined by the weather and the season, the shadows which the rain
clouds carry across it, and the darkening caused by the wind blowing over the
earth and by the approach of evening, all of that together enters human
sentiment, with Crome.

A
landscape when it is painted contains no transposition, especially when
imagination adds nothing to its effects. One must look at it. One cannot
describe it. The greatest achievement of English landscape, in the work of Old
Crome, Cotman, Bonington, and Constable, above all, furnishes Delacroix with
certain of the technical elements of the lyricism which animated French
painting for eighty years and which has not yet died out. When Delacroix saw
Constable's landscapes, the year when he was painting the "Massacre of Scio,"
he repainted his immense canvas in four days. He discovered in them a
principle, that of the division of colors, almost realized by instinct by
Veronese, by Vermeer of Delft, and by Chardin, but whose fecundity Constable,
with the severity and the thoroughness of the Englishman, consciously
demonstrated in his works. Near by one sees reds, oranges, greens, blues, and
yellows, a confused mingling of juxtaposed colors, without apparent
relationship with the distant coloration which they claim to imitate in nature,
and the well-defined form which they try to evoke. From afar, one sees the
great sky, washed and limpid, where the pearly clouds sail like ships; one sees
the watery veil ever suspended and trembling above the plain; one sees the blue
haze growing denser and stretching away to the distance. Here is the infinite
countryside, in England so rich and green after the rain, that it seems as if
spread out on a giant palette, pearly with drops of water. Everything, the
thick greensward, the deep mass of the oaks, the red and white houses appearing
amid green copses, space with its azure and silver, and the flowers sprinkled
with dew, everything shines and trembles and scintillates, like a world rising
into the daylight at the coolest and the most transparent of the hours. To
Constable the scenes of his country spoke the words, "I am the
resurrection and the life." And his soul plunged into these scenes as the
fairest woman's body plunges into the water.

It is
when Constable arrives at that transparence that he touches great painting most
nearly, and perhaps he is a greater painter when he works with watercolor than
when he tries to render, by means of the oil so lavishly used by Reynolds and
his group, the moist and glistening splendor of English landscape. Watercolor,
by its slightness of body, its liquid freshness, and its incapacity for
rendering oversubtle shades, is the material best suited to the Englishmen. Constable
owes to it his most luminous notes, Turner his most translucent jewels, and
Bonington uses it with such mastery that he reaches the point of incorporating
with his oil painting—blond, ambered, and accented by reds and greens which
seem to die out, little by little as if under a layer of water—something of its
gleam, and to offer a reflection of it to the flaming and funereal color of
Delacroix. Oil-paints, on the contrary, are almost always dangerous for the
English painters. The uniform splendor of their atmosphere does not harmonize
well with that complex material, of a profundity so rich and agitated. They
become victims of it. They desperately insist upon rendering with it their sky
laden with vapors and, at the same time, the transparence of the air so
frequently revealed to them by the sun after the rain. They triturate it, they
thicken it, deprive it of its savor by trying to make it too savory, and by
becoming exclusively absorbed in the study of it, get caught in its creamy mud,
and confuse the pearl and the silver which they have gathered from the air.
English landscape, even with Constable, often sinks into the heavy cookery in
which Reynolds left almost all his gifts.